Foreign diplomats and international aid organisations appear to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the Taliban’s new morality law, as it’s still too early to tell how strictly the rules will be enforced and what the effects on daily life and relief work across Afghanistan will be.
When Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government ratified a new series of amendments to the rules in August, it was feared it would set back efforts both to increase international engagement with the Islamic Emirate and to respond to one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
The announcement of the law, which dictates how men and women can dress in public, what content people can store on their smartphones, and whether Afghans can befriend non-Muslims, came just weeks after a breakthrough UN-led meeting in Qatar that saw Taliban officials sit face-to-face with senior foreign envoys for the first time.
The morality law shift caught diplomats and aid workers by surprise. They began to question how its enforcement would affect their ability to engage with Afghans and work with their local colleagues at a time when 23.7 million people remain in need of assistance.
After the seeming optimism of the Doha gathering, it also led to strong criticism from foreign governments: Australia, Canada, Germany, and The Netherlands said they would take the Islamic Emirate to the International Court of Justice for its “contempt” for the rights of women.
Rights activists and celebrities also took on the law.
During a speech on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep claimed the law forbade women from speaking outside the home and said: “Today in Kabul a female cat has more freedom than a woman.”
But those determined to continue engaging with the Taliban or to carry on aid work in Afghanistan are looking beyond the media furore – perpetuated in part by politicians from the former Western-backed government – to try to understand the real-life implications of the law.
What does the law actually change?
The 35 amendments to the Law on Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice include prohibitions on everything from men’s haircuts that are deemed to be against shari’a to storing any visual representations of living beings on mobile phones.
Building on the existing law, the amendments also prohibit women from sitting or intermingling with non-mahram men (men they are allowed to marry), with no clear distinctions made for personal and professional settings.
Though offices have long taken measures to ensure the segregation of the sexes, businesses and organisations with foreign, non-Muslim staff fear their presence in the workplace could be deemed as a violation of the prohibitions on Afghans interacting with non-believers.
“I don’t know if I will be allowed to speak to my colleagues, or if I’ll just have to leave at some point,” one female European NGO worker told The New Humanitarian, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic.
Local Afghan aid organisations and other Afghan businesses in Kabul, which also asked to comment anonymously, said they receive regular visits from the morality police, particularly to monitor the segregation of the sexes and to check their workers are attending communal prayers.
But this, they said, had already largely been the case, so things haven’t changed drastically. “These checks have been going on for more than two years; they’re routine,” one local Afghan NGO worker told The New Humanitarian.
What has the US reaction been?
On the sidelines of an aid conference in Dubai during the first week of October, Karen Decker, chargé d'affaires of the US mission to Afghanistan, told The New Humanitarian that Washington is closely following the enforcement of the law.
“We're still monitoring it, trying to assess what it means and how it's being implemented,” Decker said, adding that this includes discussions with sources on the ground and following media and rights group reports on any enforcement issues.
While Decker said Washington’s “humanitarian assistance continues unabated” for now, she was quick to caution that this doesn’t mean the US isn’t worried about the implications of the law, which she sees as proof that the Islamic Emirate is heading in the wrong direction.
“The morality law indicates more restrictions on Afghans, not just women, but men and women,” she said. “It’s not what we hear Afghan people say they want for their lives. So it's a cause for concern.”
Decker said the law also seems to be a step back from what she and other diplomats heard from the Taliban representatives in Doha.
“They spoke of wanting to have good relations with the international community and understanding the value of engaging in a multilateral process that helped achieve good things for the Afghan people,” Decker said of the tone at the June-July talks. “This morality law does not seem to indicate a desire to have Afghanistan be part of an international community.”
Masuda Sultan, an Afghan-American entrepreneur and women’s rights activist who has spent 25 years working on Afghan matters, agreed, fearing that the latest developments send entirely the wrong message about the Islamic Emirate wanting to engage in good faith with the world.
“Things are getting better, but the Taliban are getting worse,” she said, referring to how positive developments in the banking and diplomatic sectors are in stark contrast with the Islamic Emirate’s need to push its morality agenda and alienate potential partners.
What does the Taliban say?
The Taliban insists it is acting in accordance with its interpretation of Islamic law and the will of the Afghan people.
In a statement to The New Humanitarian, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, the Islamic Emirate’s spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said: “Our position is principled: The laws, regulations, and rules of states are the internal affairs of a country in line with their beliefs and traditions, and none has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of others.”
Balkhi went on to stress that the Afghan government’s domestic policies should not be mistaken as a lack of willingness from the Islamic Emirate to engage with the outside world.
“We remain open to engaging with all sides on economy, banking, aviation, investment, narcotics, migration, diplomatic and consular services, and a range of other issues of common interests and concerns,” he said.
And what about international aid groups?
These are, of course, not the first restrictions the Taliban has placed on the Afghan people or on NGOs.
In late 2022, shortly after having closed university doors to Afghan women, the Islamic Emirate introduced a ban on women working for NGOs.
A female worker at a leading international aid organisation said NGOs have learned to be quick on their feet to find ways to continue their work in a way that reaches all Afghans, including women and girls, while also mitigating the risk of intrusions from Islamic Emirate officials.
“Sometimes it comes down to creative wordplay,” like shifting the focus onto families rather than women, said the international aid worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her organisation’s ability to work in the country.
Other times, she said, they simply pointed out the disparities that persist in the country.
“You just have to show them the shortages and lack of capacity to convince them to let you do certain things,” she said, citing one instance when her organisation responded to criticisms of bringing women from one district to another by saying it would therefore need to train women in that second district to do the work. “When we explained that, they allowed us to set up a training centre for women in that district,” she said.
Another female NGO worker, this one from a leading European organisation, told The New Humanitarian that – so far at least – the law has not been impacting their aid operations but that this fear is always in the back of the minds of their Afghan staff.
“There is a very real sense it could happen at any time,” said the NGO worker, who asked for anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue. “If it is implemented, it would have a major impact on how we operate. It would make us question a lot of things.”
In the initial days, her male staff worried about things like the length of their facial hair — which is stipulated in the law — while the female staff worried about mentions of how they should dress and that they should only leave the house alone if absolutely necessary.
She reiterated that so far their Afghan staff members have been able to continue their work largely unimpeded but that there is no guarantee that will last: “Our female staff are scared; our male staff are scared.”
Vaguely worded
Of some solace to Decker and others is that the new law hasn’t yet been followed by the kind of en masse iron-fisted enforcement that some – both inside and outside the country – initially feared.
Without doubt, the part of the law that has received the most media attention is Article 13, which stipulates that a woman’s voice – when engaged in singing, reciting, and reading in public – is considered awrah, or an intimate part of the body. It goes on to say that a woman should “cover” her voice when out in public.
Foreign media was quickly inundated with stories claiming that Afghan women would no longer be able to speak in public. However, as Saad Mohseni, the owner of Afghanistan’s largest private television station, stated during an online interview, women continue to host and appear on programmes on privately owned media broadcast across the country. Although a 22 October report, denied to The New Humanitarian by the Islamic Emirate and private media sources, that the Taliban is planning to convert state TV stations to radio outlets may offer renewed cause for concern.
Obaidullah Baheer, an Afghan professor and lecturer who has lived between Kabul, New York, and London since the return of the Taliban, said much of the media narrative is due to the Islamic Emirate’s failure to explain their laws to the Afghan public and the outside world.
“If they hadn't opened the door for it being misinterpreted, it wouldn’t have created such a buzz,” Baheer said about the failure to clearly explain what they meant by the meaning of a woman’s voice being intimate. “Yes, that leaves the door for people to be lenient, but it also leaves the door open for people to be strict… which leaves a lot for the enforcer to decide.”
For its part, the Islamic Emirate has said that it has instructed vice and virtue enforcers to approach implementation of the law “with softness” – something also stipulated in the law itself, which devotes several articles to how enforcers should behave with the public.
But Baheer said the codification of these laws as official policy is what is particularly scary for the Afghan people, even if they are not being enforced with the same harshness and violence as they were during the previous period of Taliban rule in the 1990s.
“When the state wants to violate your private sphere and dictate to you how you look and how you act, that’s problematic,” Baheer said. ”Even if the law is softly-worded, these enforcers have a very strict view of what is to be deemed moral, so it can cause a lot of problems.”
Damaging false perceptions
Sultan, the entrepreneur and rights activist, said the nuance and complexity of the situation on the ground too often gets lost in the media and political discourse on Afghanistan, especially as it pertains to the Taliban.
“The domestic Western audience has only one view of the situation. It’s very simplistic and black and white,” Sultan said, regarding the difficulties she faces when she tries to discuss Afghanistan with decision-makers in Washington.
One perception that both Sultan and others, including Decker, are trying to change is that any aid given to the country will end up in the hands of the Taliban.
“That perception is hurting the chances [of] aid, because it makes it easier for people to say it’s better to send nothing at all,” Sultan said.
In a previous conversation with The New Humanitarian, Decker also raised this issue.
“We have verification mechanisms. We have monitoring mechanisms. We have accounting mechanisms. We are very confident that this is not happening,” Decker said. “But… we have never been able to overcome this conspiracy that somehow we are bringing money in and giving it [to the Taliban].”
But given the response of Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia, the European NGO worker said she feared the political fallout from the law would lead already hesitant governments to halt or reduce funding to Afghanistan. With just over three months left of 2024, this year’s humanitarian response programme has only seen 24% of its $3.06 billion funded. She said that during the Dubai meeting, there was definitely a sense that the new law “could be used as an excuse: ‘The Taliban are too difficult to deal with.’”
Despite such concerns, Decker said the law has not yet led any countries that were increasing their diplomatic engagement with Afghanistan to radically change course. “A number of countries have visited Afghanistan or have a more permanent presence on the ground without recognising the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan,” she said.
In the last year, the UK’s Doha-based chargé d’affaires, Robert Chatterton Dickson, has made several trips to Kabul. Japan has also kept its embassy in the Afghan capital open, while the UAE and Uzbekistan now officially recognise the Islamic Emirate’s diplomats as ambassadors.
However, Decker said that while she appreciates that both Afghan people and international organisations are finding workarounds that enable them to carry on with their social lives and with their work, the US and other countries must focus on the written laws, not the exceptions.
“The law has been published, and I think it's important to make it clear that we will make policy decisions on the basis of edicts they release; more so than on how those edicts are implemented,” Decker said. “A statement of policy is a statement of policy. We will respond accordingly.”
Edited by Andrew Gully.
